Metropolitan Police: Stephen Port Murders Inquest

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Monday 13th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Kit Malthouse]

The police have extensive training on many of these issues. Although I acknowledge that trust and confidence in the police have taken a battering over the past few months, it is worth remembering that the people who are most profoundly upset by this are the thousands of police officers, of all types, across the country who want their profession and vocation to be held in high esteem by the people they serve, not least because that was the primary motivation for their joining.

The police service in this country is changing very significantly, not least because, as the hon. Lady will know, we are recruiting a new generation of police officers who will massively expand capacity and bring a new mindset into the organisation. This presents an enormous opportunity to diversify the police and to see the kind of cultural shift that, to be fair, has been ongoing for the past 20 years.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

Something as appalling as this deserves more than to be tacked on to an existing inquiry. It surely requires a public inquiry, as other colleagues have called for, to look at the totality and horror of this event.

The Minister mentioned the idea of specialist officers within the force. I understand the need for them and can see some value in the idea, but is there not a greater problem in the general attitudes throughout the force? The danger of having specialist officers is that things get shoved on to them and ignored by everybody else. What we need is a change of culture as a whole right across the Metropolitan police force.

[Kit Malthouse]

Obviously there is a strong role for specialist officers in particular aspects of investigation or in investigations that have particular characteristics. The key thing is that those officers work hand in glove with other officers, particularly those based in a borough, who very often are able to piece together the investigation in a way that a specialist officer is not. One of the improvements the Metropolitan police are putting in place is better training for frontline response officers to make sure that they are able to follow an investigation from start to finish, basically, much more and that only the most serious of crimes are handed off to the specialists, in a way that is co-ordinated. Therefore, the chain in intelligence and the appreciation of the full picture, if you like, of what has happened in a related set of offences will not be lost to the organisation.